Michael Dell, CEO and Founder of Dell, said on Thursday, “We're decreasing our head count. It's declined in the past two quarters and it will decline again in the first quarter. And we will go past the 8,800 target previously discussed as we achieve everything that I'm outlining today."

The AP reports that 5,500 Dell jobs have been cut so far with 1,000 more cuts coming this quarter. However, Dell CFO Donald Carty does say that there has been an increase in frontline personnel like sales and customer support for a net reduction of 3,200 jobs so far.

Dell isn’t alone in cutting jobs; Motorola is having its own problem with profitability and too many mouths to feed. Motorola announced recently that it wanted to break into two companies in an effort to become more profitable.

Motorola announced today that it would cut an additional 2,600 jobs adding up to 10,000 jobs cut since the beginning of 2007. The reason for the job cuts is blamed in part on the poor sales of cellular phones. The layoffs are the first wave of a plan to save Motorola $500 million this year.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Motorola from a statement saying, “The work-force reductions are intended to make financial resources available for strategic business investment, while better aligning operational costs and expenses with business growth.”

Motorola is cutting jobs both abroad and at home, 354 of the jobs cut were in Plantation, Florida where handsets for use on WiMax networks were in development. The sad state of WiMax in the U.S. with Sprint continually postponing its Xohm rollout likely had an effect on those cuts.

"When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." -- Sony BMG attorney Jennifer Pariser